When Bourgeois’s father passed away in 1951, says the artist’s one-time assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, “she went into a deep depression and began psychoanalysis. She wouldn’t have another one-man show until 1964, and it was like a whole new Louise Bourgeois.”

Rather than the carved wood pieces that stood directly on the floor she had shown previously, this whole new Bourgeois debuted hanging works. “She eliminated the pedestal, so that the pieces had a relationship to the architecture,” Gorovoy says. “They could spin or turn; they’re not stable or even, so they have an ambivalence.” These suspended installations in part enacted the limbo of the artist’s mourning period, her complicated and ever-shifting relationship to a parent’s passing.